NO, I don’t want to write about the affair of Ya’ir Netanyahu. I refuse adamantly. No force in the world will compel me to do so. Yet here I am, writing about Ya’ir, damn it. Can’t resist. And perhaps it is really more than a matter of gossip. Perhaps it is something that we cannot … Read more
I AM angry with the Mizrahi elite. Very angry indeed. Mizrah is the Hebrew word for East. Eastern Jews are those who lived for many centuries in the Islamic world. Western Jews are those who lived in Christian Europe. The words are, of course, misnomers. Russian Jews are “Westerners”, Moroccan Jews are “Easterners”. A look … Read more
NOBODY DESCRIBED the outbreak of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict better than the historian Isaac Deutscher. A man lives in a house that catches fire. To save his life, he jumps out of the window. He lands on a passer-by in the street below and injures him grievously. Between the two a bitter enmity arises. Who is … Read more
ANYONE PROPOSING the death penalty is either a complete fool, an incorrigible cynic or mentally disturbed – or all of these. There is no effective therapy for any of these defects. I wouldn’t even try. A fool would not understand the overwhelming evidence for the conclusion. For a cynic, advocacy of the death penalty is … Read more
FOR GOD’S SAKE, are they crazy? They congregate in the marketplace, boys of 15, 16 years, take stones and throw them at our soldiers, who are armed to the teeth. The soldiers shoot, sometimes over their heads, sometimes straight at them. Every day there are wounded, every few days there are dead. What for? They … Read more
EHUD BARAK has “broken the silence”. He has published an article in The New York Times attacking our prime minister in the most abrasive terms. In other words, he has done exactly the same as the group of ex-soldiers who call themselves “Breaking the Silence”, who are accused of washing our dirty linen abroad. They … Read more
ZIONISM IS an anti-Semitic creed. It was so right from the beginning. Already the founding father, Theodor Herzl, a Viennese writer, penned some pieces with a clear anti-Semitic slant. For him, Zionism was not just a geographical transplantation, but also a means of turning the despicable commercial Jew of the Diaspora into an upright, industrious … Read more
SUDDENLY, A terrible thought struck me. What if Avi Gabbay really believes what he is saying? Impossible. He cannot really believe all those things. No, no. But if he does? Where does that leave us? AVI GABBAY is the new leader of the Israeli Labor Party. Until recently, he was a founding member of a … Read more
I am furious. And I have good reason to be furious. I was going to write an article about a subject I have been thinking about for a long time. This week I opened the New York Times and lo, my yet unwritten article appeared on its opinion pages in full, argument after argument. How … Read more
DURING THE last few days, I met with two old friends: Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. Well, the term “friends” may not quite be appropriate. Certainly, Arafat called me “my friend” in a recorded message for my 70th birthday, but Rabin called nobody “friend”. That was not his character. I am glad that I knew … Read more